All 4 Uses
secular
in
The Crying of Lot 49
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- Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers.†
Chpt 4 *
- On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving.†
Chpt 5
- But over the next century and a ha If the paranoia recedes, as they come to discover the secular Tristero.†
Chpt 6
- She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages.†
Chpt 6
Definitions:
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(1)
(secular as in: a secular organization) not religious
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(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Much more rarely, secular means not a member of the clergy or not belonging to a specific religious order.
Also rarely, secular can reference long time spans in various senses such as:- a one-time rather than a cyclical event -- such as "a secular decrease in real estate prices" or "a secular rather than a periodic planetary perturbation"
- a once-in-an-age or once per century event -- such as "The Secular Games of Rome"
In physics, secular equilibrium refers to a state where a radioactive isotope decays at the same rate at which it is produced.